Last fall we announced a survey in this list about how and why breaking changes are handled differently in 18 different software ecosystems, including Go. We've just submitted a paper to a conference about the results, and we've also set up a site where you can compare how different ecosystems perceived(http://breakingapis.org/survey) their values, practices of upstream and downstream developers, and the health of their ecosystem.
Results showed some stark differences between software communities, for example: Making updates available to end users quickly ( http://breakingapis.org/survey/values.html#rapid?ecos=Haskell_Stack_Stackage_,Node_js_NPM,Ruby_Rubygems) was highly valued by Node and Ruby communities, but was considered less important to Eclipse. The Perl and Eclipse communities value stability ( http://breakingapis.org/survey/values.html#stability?ecos=Eclipse_plugins_,Haskell_Cabal_Hackage_,Perl_CPAN) most, while Hackage/Cabal valued it least. Ecosystems have very different ways of dealing with versioning; for example in Go it's common for people to sometimes make small updates without increasing the version number ( http://breakingapis.org/survey/upstream.html#mon_versionless_updates_eco?ecos=Go,Maven,Node_js_NPM). In Rust, developers more frequently chip in and help with maintenance of upstream packages ( http://breakingapis.org/survey/downstream.html#sync_liaison_code?ecos=NuGet,Rust_Cargo) than in NuGet. There are a lot of other results on the linked site, and we’re interested in your impressions of the results. Do the results make sense to you? What answers would you have expected? Do you think the differences are intentional? If you have any thoughts about it I’ll try to keep up with comments here, or you can also send us comments through the website. The anonymized raw data ( https://figshare.com/articles/Culture_and_Breaking_Change_A_Survey_of_Values_and_Practices_in_18_Open_Source_Software_Ecosystems/5108716) is also available. We want to sincerely thank the large number of people in the Go community who responded, and we’re eager to hear what you think! Chris, Anna, Jim, and Christian -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
